It is sort of a Middle Eastern bizarro version of the Dred Scott decision. In that famous American Supreme Court case from1857, it was decided to send black escaped slave Dred Scott back to slavery in the South. This triggered enormous public outrage and paved the way for Lincoln’s election. In the Israeli analogue, Jewish leftists are collaborating with the “Palestinian Authority” of the PLO and turning over to it innocent Arab Dred Scotts, who have done business with Jews, so that the PLO will torture and murder them.
The “star” of the story is a leftist extremist named Ezra Nawi, who has become something of a poster boy for the radical Left. “Nawi” is a well-known and ordinarily distinguished surname among Jews who came from Iraq. Most of these are patriotic Zionists, but a small minority of them were communists back in Iraq in the 1940s/1950s and have remained such. A few of these Iraqi Jews continue to embrace communism, like the radical anti-Zionist sociologist from Tel Aviv University, Yehouda Shenhav.
Nawi famously was convicted of pedophilia and rape of a minor boy some years ago. Later he was also convicted of violently attacking police as part of a riot of violent Palestinians he helped lead. He speaks Arabic and likes to dress as an Arab. He is active in small far-leftist anti-Israel NGOs operating in Israel that pretend to be “human rights groups,” including B’tselem and Taayoush. These are foreign-funded subversive groups that have never heard of any human right for Jews worthy of being defended and certainly not the right of self-defense against genocidal terror and Islamofascist aggression. They are also notoriously indifferent to violations of free speech rights of anyone not from the far Left.
Those arrests turned Nawi into a minor folk hero for the radical Left around the world, where people like Noam Chomsky came out in support of him. Within Israel the anti-Israel Tenured Left embraced Nawi. The anti-Semitic pro-terror pseudo-academic Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University, Israel’s Norman Finkelstein, who has himself served illegally as a human shield to defend terrorists and disrupt IDF anti-terror operations, leads the Nawi groupies. Gordon claims Nawi’s only offense is being too caring and compassionate. The campaign to support the Pedophile for Palestine has gone global. The presidential bid in Ireland in 2011 was disrupted when it was disclosed that candidate Senator David Norris was intimately tied to Nawi and had supported him. Norris had to drop out of the race.
Nawi in recent days suddenly was thrust into the limelight when he was the subject of an expose broadcast by Israel’s leading investigative reporter, Ilana Dayan, on the prestigious “Uvda (Fact)” television news show. Dayan, who is hardly a right-winger, broadcast a tape made surreptitiously by an investigator who had infiltrated Taayoush. There Nawi boasts about informing to the PLO about Arabs who have sold land to Jews, saying he knows full well that they will be tortured and murdered for this “crime.” As part of the PLO’s moderation and devotion to peace and coexistence with Israel, it has long followed a policy of murdering any Palestinian conducting such business with Jews. The Left’s “human rights” NGOs have never had very much to say about this. But in Nawi’s case, we are not talking about turning a blind eye but rather about serving as accomplice in the murder of innocent Arabs.
A.B. Yehoshua is one of Israel’s best-known writers and also a leading figure in the political Left. In response to the Nawi Affair, he came out in FAVOR of turning the Arab Dred Scotts over to the PLO, justifying their torture and murder, saying it is no one else’s business if the PLO does this. Yehoshua is a leader in B’tselem. He was quoted as saying:
“Selling of land needs to be clear and to be written down in the land registry…You cannot hide the sale of land by one person to another. The [Palestinian] Authority’s mechanisms and the mechanisms of a formal body that we recognize and about whose existence we are glad. We want transparency. Everything that is done here – I want transparency….What their fate will be is a separate matter.” He added: “Whom they torture and whom they do not torture, that is their problem already.” “B’tselem’s activists need not interfere in the relations among the Palestinians,” he said. “We see it as a foreign country. If the Authority’s laws give them the right to do so, then that’s it.”
The response of much of the rest of the Israeli Left was to denounce Dayan and her TV channel for daring to expose the story and discredit the Left. Some leftists are insisting Nawi was “set up” in a provocation by right-wingers or settlers. The heads of the “human rights NGO” B’tselem rallied round Nawi and defended him, also defending the torture and murder of Arabs by the Palestinian Authority. The lawyer representing the far-leftist Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Michael Sfard, dismissed the TV documentary as a toady broadcast in service of the Right. The ACRI is headed by yet another Jewish communist from Iraq, author Sami Michael. The head of “Peace Now” pooh-poohed the Nawi story and insisted that the REAL set of crimes were those of settlers. The head of the small far-leftist Mertz party, Zehava Galon, had praised Nawi in the past but was ducking questions this week.
Gidon Levy, a fanatic anti-Israel propagandist from the far-leftist daily Haaretz, in effect the Lord Haw Haw of the country, denounced the TV documentary for embarrassing the Left instead of demonizing the Right. He wrote:
“How has a McCarthyist right-wing organization, whose motives are clear (and despicable) and whose sources are unknown, succeeded with such ease in enticing such respected journalists as Ilana Dayan and Omri Assenheim? How has this flagship joined the ranks of the false propaganda which masquerades as journalism? That is how to conduct delegitimization. That is how it is done to liberal organizations in the darkest of regimes, and now here too, and on Uvda – no less.”
Conservatives filed complaints with the police, demanding that Nawi be prosecuted. Don’t hold your breath for that to happen. Leftists in Israeli calling for violence or engaging in it are never prosecuted by the authorities.
All of this dramatically illuminates what is at stake with a proposed bill that would require transparency in the funding of radical anti-Israel NGOs operating in Israel, whose funding invariably comes from belligerent donors and overseas groups. Their support within Israel is miniscule but they are awash in millions of dollars from overseas. It is a bit like a hypothetical situation in which pro-Axis NGOs might have operated in the 1940s in the US and Britain, with financing from outside the country. The bill before the Israeli parliament would not ban them but would require reps of these NGOs to wear tags identifying themselves as agents for foreign entities when lobbying in parliament.
The Left is aghast at all that, screaming it is fascism. Eurocrats have protested, and even the Obama White House has denounced the bill, which is less stringent than similar US laws governing lobbyists who have foreign funding. The Bash-Israel lobby insists these NGOs are merely concerned with “human rights.” Like the human right of the PLO to torture and murder Arabs who do business with Jews. Ironically, the PLO is also notorious for murdering and torturing homosexuals, although it is willing to give the pedophile Nawi a pass.
The involvement of leaders from Israeli leftist NGOs in murder and the rallying of the NGOs in solidarity with the murderers/accomplices, including a murdering pedophile, shows their true character. Never before have leftist “human rights groups” been so dramatically unmasked.